Posts tagged with: Film/Video
Link Love: 7/24/2015
- A first for the Smithsonian - "Reboot the Suit" - The National Air and Space Museum has turned to Kickstarter to help fund the conservation, digitization, and display Neil Armstrong's Apollo 11 spacesuit in time for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Moon landing. [via AirSpace blog, NASM]
- We're going on a field trip - The Getty will provide any Title I school that is within a 30-mile radius of the Museum and can fill a bus with 50 students a free bus for their field trip. [via The Getty Iris]
- Before Rosa Parks there was Irene Morgan, who on July 16, 1944 made a decision that would later turn into a movement of bus boycotts, and eventually the Civil Rights Movement. [American History Through an African American Lens tumblr, NMAAHC]
- With the help of visitor feedback, the National Museum of Natural History continues to work on the new National Fossil Hall. [via Unearthed blog, NMNH]
- The Associated Press will be uploading more than 550,000 historical video clips to YouTube. [via PetaPixel]
- The power of MARC - Making the Russell E. Train Africana Collection more accessible at the Smithsonian Libraries. [via Unbound blog, SIL]
- The National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages, organized and supported by the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History, works to revitalize endangered languages. [via Smithsonian Science News]
- The British Library takes you inside Europe's oldest intact book in the video below. [via InfoDocket]
Link Love: 7/10/2015
- Awesome sauce! Can't wait for the Smithsonian American Art Museum's exhibition, Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty, the first restrospective exhibition in 20 years of Penn's photography and which will also include 48 previously unseen or never exhibited photographs. [via SI Newsdesk]
- Stanford University Libraries recently released the newest version of their open source program, ePADD, which addresses the privacy and access challenges of archives containing electronic communications and provides unprecedented access to email archives. [via Stanford University Libraries]
- How were you made "Steggy"? A look at how the papier mâché model of the stegosaurus was put together after having been on display at the National Museum of Natural History for 107 years. [via Unearthed blog, NMNH]
- Researcher beware - The papers of Marie Curie are still radioactive and will be for the forseeable future. [via Open Culture]
- A great behind-the-scenes look at the The Library of Congress’ Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation in Culpepper, Virginia. [via Wired]
- The complexities of film - This is a great video that explains the engineering behind a film projector. [via PetaPixel]
Link Love: 6/12/2015
- Talk about time capsule - While undergoing renovations last week, workers at Emerson High School in Oklahoma City uncovered a set of unerased chalkboards hidden in the walls dating back to 1917. [via Colossal]
- Celebrating 100 years - The Coca-Cola bottle. [via Prologue: Pieces of History, NARA]
- In other discovery news - An original Star Wars script was discovered in University of New Brunswick Library. [via InfoDocket]
- Excellent resource - The National Library of Medicine's Directory of History of Medicine Collections. [via Circulating Now, NLM]
- Acquisition of note: The archive of Ben Bradlee (1921-2014), former editor of The Washington Post, has been donated to the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. [via InfoDocket]
- Not expected - Soft tissue was found in 75-million year old dinosaur fossil that was not well preserved. [via The Verge]
- This week Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington announced that he would be retiring as of January 1, 2016. [via InfoDocket]
- Seemingly lost, but now found is KQED's groundbreaking 1961 documentary, The Rejected, which was the first ever nationally-televised documentary about homosexuality. [via KQED News]
Link Love: 2/27/2015
- The delights of browsing the National Park Service's B-roll video archive. [via Motherboard]
- Now available online - University of North Carolina archaeologists and librarians produce an online catalog of artifacts. [via InfoDocket]
- Now you don't see that everyday - A CT scan of a 1,000-year-old Buddha statue shows the mummified remains of a monk inside along with rolls of paper scraps with Chinese writing where his organs would be. [via Colossal]
- Accessing the inaccessible - Drones used to create a 3D model of Christ the Redeemer statue on top of Corcovado Mountain in Rio de Janeiro. [via The Verge]
- 40 years in the making - A brief history of the building of the Washington Monument. [via The Libray of Congress blog]
- The National Museum of African American History and Culture published a new book, Through the African American Lens, that offer iconic images of black culture, activism and community in America. [via Time]
- New blog alert - bloggERS! - the new blog of the Society of American Archivists' Electronic Records Section. [via Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig, SIA]
- A piece of photography history - a 19th century photo album by Oscar Gustave Rejlander has been sold, but the United Kingdom has put an export ban on it in the hopes of keeping it within the UK. [via PetaPixel]
- For those of you old enough to remember - A look at a technological icon - The fax machine. [via BBC Future]
- That's Awesome! - An entomologist at the Natural History Museum in London is using LEGOs to build a device that holds fragile insect specimens. [via The Atlantic]
Workflow Dynamics of Digital Preservation
The Smithsonian Channel produces award-winning television programming that engages viewers much in the same way as the Smithsonian's museums and galleries do throughout the United States with their visitors. Just as the Smithsonian is working to digitize its collections for greater access and preservation, the Smithsonian Channel and the Smithsonian Institution Archives are also undertaking various efforts to ensure the digital preservation of these television programs.
The reformatting workflow for this project has been dynamic, and it should be. During earlier accessions of Smithsonian Channel programming, the progams were transferred on DVDs, numbering in the hundreds. In order to preserve the files digitally and prepare them for ingest into the Smithsonian's Digital Asset Management System (DAMS), the DVDs undertook a lengthy workflow process to ensure the highest level of playability and playback quality.
As part of the project's workflow, and best practices at the Archives, each disc is individually scanned using virus detection software. While this process is lengthy, it is critical to ensuring the security of the Archives' IT infrastructure. The next step in the workflow is to individually create .ISO images of each disc, which retains each program's DVD menu functionality. After creation of the .ISOs, the individual .vobs are extracted and converted to a single .vob using a command prompt script. This single .vob is then converted to an .mpeg, also using command prompt, to ensure the greatest playability across multiple software programs. This process is individually repeated for every DVD within the collection and can take months to complete.
After creation of the mpegs, the associated metadata must be created for each individual file in preparation for ingest into the DAMs. The metadata is applied to each file using Adobe Bridge; however, the metadata cannot be embedded into the actual video files, thus creating a sidecar .xmp file is necessary to hold the associated video file's metadata. Once this process is complete, the .ISO, .mpg, and .xmp files are entered simultaneously into the DAMs to ensure to proper parent (.iso)/child (.mpg and .xmp) relationships are maintained.
Throughout the entire workflow, upon initial receipt, after each conversion, and after upload to the DAMs, each file has been viewed for quality assurance, furthering adding time to an already lengthy workflow. In total, processing the collection of 136 DVDs within the accession took roughly 300 hours to complete.
In an effort to simplify the workflow, archivists from the Smithsonian Channel and the Archives met to develop a plan to achieve maximum efficiency with the preservation of Smithsonian Channel's programming. During the meeting, it was decided to test a pilot program wherein the Smithsonian Channel would send a number of .mov files through a secure server to the Archives to develop a new workflow based solely on the digital transfer of the Smithsonian Channel's programs. While not eliminating the original DVD transfer yet, this process significantly decreased the workflow and time involved in the entire preservation process.
With the transfer of the .mov files, the conversion process was removed entirely from the workflow. Further, the metadata can be directly embedded into the file header of the .mov files, eliminating the need to create a separate file for the metadata. For DAMs ingest, only the .mov file is needed, as opposed to the .ISO, .mpg, and the .xmp file. In essence, what used to take nearly 300 hours to complete could essentially be completed in as little as a day for a collection of programming.
By making the process of preserving the Smithsonian Channel programs simpler and easier, programs can be preserved more quickly and with less files to work with and a more straightforward workflow there is less likelihood for errors to be made. The collaborative effort between the Smithsonian Channel and the Archives is a prime example of two institutions working together in the effort of digital preservation.
Related Resources
- What are You Watching?, The Bigger Picture blog, Smithsonian Institution Archives
- And Action: The Ins and Outs of DVD Video Preservation, The Bigger Picture blog, Smithsonian Institution Archives
- Digital Video Preservation: Further Challenges for Preserving Digital Video and Beyond, The Bigger Picture blog, Smithsonian Institution Archives
Related Collections
- Smithsonian Channel records at the Smithsonian Institution Archives
- ‹ previous
- 2 of 24
- next ›
Produced by the Smithsonian Institution Archives. For copyright questions, please see the Terms of Use.
